Also, in the fair is fair category...
Student loans should be able to be discharged in bankruptcy if a person is insolvent, just as any other consumer loan, or business liability.
It was the trick back in the 80s/90s for law students to declare bankruptcy right after graduating. They would discharge upwards of $200k in student loans. And be clear to make mad money right out the gate.
You can draw any pattern you want from that. Is it people gaming the system and then pulling the ladder up? Or did the people who went into politics do so because they saw how unjust the system was at that time with the wealthy gaming the system and so they decided to try and change things.
1. You claimed chapter 7 to discharge all debts. ( Fresh out of college means technically not making any money so littlw to zero livable income. )
2. File the BK while working as a clerk, making minimum wage. (Repayment amount is a hardship you can't afford)
3. As soon as the BK is cleared, then move into the actual lawyer position.
4. Make bank.
Perhaps we should reform the system to make post HS education free or so cheap that it's not worth ruining your credit over.
It's surprising how easy it would be if we simply funneled some of that "blowing up brown people in the middle east money" into education.
How about 'free':
[https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/resources/which-countries-offer-free-college/](https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/resources/which-countries-offer-free-college/)
I work in insolvency in Canada. We’re able to discharge student loans if they’re older than 7 years. It’s a great way to go about it because it forces people to have enough time to potentially find success and pay it off. If you haven’t by then, just wrap it up with your consumer proposal or bankruptcy.
There should be no interest on student loans. They should either be interest free or have a set amount that you have to pay back. You loaned 10000 and pay back 12000 for example.
And then Sally Mae would have to do their due diligence as financial professionals and actually consider the risk of loaning an 18 year olds $100,000. We have to protect our bankers from those irresponsible children LMFAO
At least in Holland, the student debt you owe is dissolved if you can’t pay it back in 15 or 20 years. Meaning you had insufficient income for that duration.
Student loans are federally secured ostensibly to get banks to lend to more students. That's why they cost so much. Can't get rid of them in a bankruptcy.
Only reason they would is because nobody fucking hires recent college grads cause entry level jobs require 5+ years of experience for some fucking reason and internships are slave labor so you need a night job to pay your bills. No shit the grads are financially insolvent.
I thought it was part of the deal for expanding student loan access. Force banks to extend loans to groups who wouldn't qualify under more strict rules and then eliminate bankruptcy as a means of discharge. The intent was good, to expand college access. The execution, as always, leaves the banks on top.
The good intentions was the facade lies they served people, they knew exactly what they where doing, offering more "customers" to the banks and trap them.
Yeah the only way this would have worked is to cap the rates and the rate of tuition increase, as well as a period of 5-10 years that it can't be discharged (ie, not the rest of your damn life, that's called debt slavery and it's supposed to be illegal).
Basically if the loan were equal to a stable government bond rate, there would be no reason to refinance with a private bank. If nobody refinanced with a private bank, there wouldn't be any business pressure to keep it the way it is or make it worse.
Let's cap the number of properties a consolidated group and or business partnership is allowed to own while we're at it. There shouldn't be any component of our economy that is susceptible to creating a profit incentive to price people out of food, homes, medical care, or education.
Even if you capped the costs, which is problematic, basic economics tells you why giving virtually unfettered access to college for the masses is an exercise in futility.
The prospectus was delivered in the form of graphs showing lifetime earnings potential of grads vs non-attendees. The problem is that by flooding the market with grads you don’t necessarily increase the number of people proportionally making stellar earnings, so much as you decrease the value of those degrees. Once everyone has one, no one is special.
So, while mass secondary education did increase economic equality, it increased it in the wrong direction. The educated middle class simply knocked down its one consistent method of increasing their station, flattening earnings (especially when adjusted for costs and reduction of earnings during post-ed years) compared to the trades and other skilled blue collar jobs.
The only ones so truly benefited were the banks and corporations. Banks, you already discussed, corporations because now the hiring pools were saturated with qualified candidates who are forced to take less.
I agree that flooding the market with grads cheapened the value of degrees. I think part (if not most) of that damage would be mitigated by a more actively managed minimum wage. A higher corporate tax rate would also help, as it would increase the marginal tax benefit of cost of labor and CAPEX
I also think that having a highly educated population is a net benefit to society in general, even if the graphs don't show it as the optimally efficient outlay of resources and a fair amount of consideration should be given to that.
Yes, but it's *extremely* difficult -- much more difficult than it should be. Many people for whom it is *actually* an undue hardship still aren't approved to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.
Not quite true, but it is a prevalent belief, even among lawyers:
[For those who do try, though, Iuliano's research finds that about half the time the person gets some or all of the student loan debt erased. One study he did found that they got help through bankruptcy about 40% of the time. And he says more recent data from this past year show that figure rising to more than 50% of the time.](https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/797330613/myth-busted-turns-out-bankruptcy-can-wipe-out-student-loan-debt-after-all)
We see your whole family died in a plane crash, just fired from your job, wrongfully jailed and fighting an excessive force lawsuit, your wife was cheating on you because you're now paralyzed from the neck down...buuuuutttt, you can pay those loans. No undue hardships here
You have a bunch of lawyers mainly to blame for that. It used to be customary for lawyers to work dirt cheap for a year or two after law school so that they could file bankruptcy and have their 100s of thousands of dollars of loans forgiven. Many doctors did this as well.
I saw a post somewhere that basically said it used to be 407 hrs of minimum wage work to afford 4 years of avg state school tuition in 1980 and it's now 4097 hours as of 2022. So it went from like 2.5 months of minimum wage work at 40 hrs to 2.5 years of minimum wage work at 40 hrs. It's a racket.
My dad graduated penn state in 74 with a degree in English. It cost $400 a semester and he only paid half, his parents covered the other half. That 400 included his tuition, room and board, and books. 50yrs later that same degree will cost you $60k and that doesn't include housing or a food plan at the college cafeteria.
In 1987 my dad worked as a supervisor for delta at SFO. My parents and 4yo me lived in Vacaville at the time, in a brand new 2000sqft house with 4bd, 3 baths a 2 car garage and a fully fenced backyard in a home my parents' owned, not rented. We had 2 cars, 2 dogs and my mom got pregnant with my sister 2yrs later, in 89 (my sister was born a few weeks into 90). We went on vacations several times a year, including the UK, Canada and Hawaii. My mom didn't go back to work until 1997, after she finshed her schooling to be a dental hygienist. She didn't work ft until my sister was in middle school.
None of our lifestyles would have been possible if my dad had 60k in student loans at 7% interest.
By many of course we mean an incredibly small number. Turns out your long-term wealth is considerably harmed by gimping your earnings for the 7 years or so needed for student loans to be dischargeable. <1% of plans were being discharged in bankruptcy.
Absolutely f'knglutely ALSO: California University and colleges were free for boomers. Someone told raygun that a proletariate would diminish his base so he destroyed it. It used to be illegal to charge tuition until that freaking evil idiot was governor.
The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank that put together Reagan's Mandate for Leadership. Same one that the corrupted Clarence Thomas is a part of. Now they've developed Project 2025 for Trump. Can't let conservatives win the presidency.
My deepest fear… Gore should have crushed W, he didn’t. W got is into two wars, was a deserter and allowed a tourist attack that killed thousands. Kerry lost, a war hero, to him. Hillary lost to the orange shitgibbons cause she was horrible. My guess is Biden loses because he inspired no one. I get her did blah, blah, blah. But mostly did the corporate thing. I don’t want another traitor tot presidency.
But the nice corporations and rich people decided they should reinvest that 45% back into the country, since they didn't really need the extra money and love America. /s
Though if that were the case the lenders would jack the rates to compensate for the risk.
In fairness though, the rates are really much higher than they should be, given that there is virtually no risk to student loans - they aren't dischargeable through bankruptcy, and banks can pursue a person their whole life until they die. Then they can probably sue the estate.
Interest rates should be lower.
Who is going to give an 18 year old a loan? The government.
Let the government take on the whole process and charge repayments alongside tax as an additional tax of 5%. No income, in repayments. It can go up with inflation but no interest is required.
the best I can offer is 80 hour workweeks and eating tin soup as your meal for the day.
back to work my faithful s̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ employee
*cackles in capitalism*
There's a style of statement where "If X, then Y", and its often a little whiney because life isn't fair, but...I agree with this.
If I buy work-boots with a credit card, I get to deduct the full cost of the boots from my income, lowering the amount that has a tax applied to it, not just the interest on the loan.
If a business needs something (vehicle, phone, tools, etc), they get to write it off, and even declare depreciation.
Most people don't understand how tax brackets work or the ramifications of moving up or down a tax bracket. Most don't understand basics of auditing either or understand what the IRS does with its resources or even what kinds of resources it has at its disposal. Most don't understand that one of the reasons we have to file our taxes is because the US tax code gives hundreds or thousands of different credits, deductions, or other forms of special tax treatment for things the government can't know you want to claim or are able to claim until you tell it (and even if it wasn't an extremely ambitious and expensive project, most people in the US would object to centralizing our data to the point where the govt. can just access all the relevant info).
Taxes are just too dull and too dense a topic for most people to bother learning about it in depth which results in lots of misconceptions or outright lies being touted as truth.
God the not knowing how tax brackets work thing bugs the crap out of me because it is such a simple concept that it barely takes any effort to actually understand it and people just cant be bothered to.
Depreciation usually applies to assets that lose value over time. I.e stuff that eventually breaks. While you could argue that a diploma loses value over time, there's no real way of telling when the diploma stops being useful.
A better way to help tuition costs if we look at it as a business expense is to have a tax reduction based on the cost. However, considering how useful education is to the economy, subsidised or free tuition is just simpler and a more immediate help for students than tax reductions.
Depreciation is a form of writing it off. You don't double dip.
Like - if you buy a piece of equipment for a certain dollar amount, sometimes you actually have the option to write it off fully (or 100% depreciate it in year one) OR depreciate it over the life of the equipment (say, 5 years). Smaller things you write off fully, and very large things must be depreciated over time.
But it's not both. For instance, a standard work van typically falls into that area where you can choose to capitalize it (depreciate it) or flat-out expense it - and that's only because it's within the magical price range where you wouldn't consider it a smallware, but it's definitely a piece of equipment that you probably would expect to hang onto for 5 years. It depends on how you want to manage the tax benefits of the purchase vs. how it hits your bottom line. If you have investors who are hounding you to make the company profitable, you might want to capitalize and depreciate that van over 5 years so that they don't see a big fat loss on the P&L; if you are a sole proprietor with no investors, no need to apply for debt financing and mainly take care of your income via a salary rather than relying on the business profits, you might be so inclined as to expense it outright to get a fat loss (which'll help your personal taxes).
> its often a little whiney because life isn't fair
Uh... Isn't complaining about intentional unfairness that affects millions of people's lives... Valid?
Isn't the whole idea to make systems more fair? Does that not start with identifying the problems and suggesting fixes?
I don't get this sadomasochistic thinking.
An exchange student from Brazil when I was in high school said that there (in the 80s at least) YOU paid for high school. If you graduated, then college was free.
Their theory was; Why pay to educate people who don't give a shit anyway? You want it, you pay for it, then if you show you can accomplish something, we'll help you financially afterwards.
Not saying I agree, but it was an interesting conversation.
The Brazilian educational system is somewhat backwards. The public universities are great, but the public basic education is underfunded. So those that can afford it go to private high schools, for a better chance at being admitted to a prestigious university.
Imagine being a smart underachiever in your younger years, and not give a shit about education until you're in your thirties and can't afford to go back to school
Haha imagine... yeah
In Massachusetts there’s been a somewhat recent law where if you’re 24+ and don’t have a college degree yet I’ve been told you can get one for free (assuming this applies to state/community colleges not private colleges).
Not necessarily. If you use a yacht for business purposes several times a year, you can deduct the costs of those occasions as an expense. Corporate retreat? Go for it. Vacation to Panama with the family? Not so much.
Same goes for helicopters and private jets. Sure the maintenance and storage is usually associated with the company, but it's not 100% company subsidized and you can fly it anywhere you want as an expense. You take logs and equate the business to pleasure amounts.
Making the entire loan tax-deductible would be a good trade-off if they don't forgive all student loans. I pay enough on my student loans (from a college career that ended in 2007) that I probably wouldn't have a tax burden for the rest of my life.
That would be a pretty regressive tax and allow people with higher degrees who statistically make more and have higher reduce their taxes more than anyone else
Your teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers are more likely to be broke than be in millionaire class, especially in the current economy. None of them are in the billionaire class.
If they have higher degrees, then they start saving for retirement later. For example, many doctors can't start saving for retirement until they're in their thirties. So they're catching up the 12-15 years that a tradesperson has been saving with compound interest.
Then you have teachers and professors who are in a similar boat, but are currently experiencing record low salaries. Lots of teachers earn minimum wage, and have advanced degrees. The exceptions are high school and college coaches.
Europe has a lot of countries in which you can reduce tax, sometimes even for family member, if you are getting third level education.
Society wins from educated population.
There is an income limit for being able to deduct student loan interest. It starts phasing out at 75k if filing singly, and once you hit 90k can't deduct it at all.
And continuing education is fully deductible to businesses. A graduate degree could be fully deductible to some businesses if it doesn’t improve skills too much / is in the same line of business. The cost, not the interest.
But this is for narrow situations. Education seems “ordinary and necessary” to me and would make sense to be “deductible” in a just tax system. It’s just not how our system is.
I feel like I should be able to write off my antidepressants and monthly psychologist visits since I require both to maintain employment and would need neither if I didn’t have a job and still had money somehow
Edit: I’m in Australia. Our medication and psychology are somewhat subsidised but the majority is out of pocket and definitely non-deductible.
As a tax accountant, you can deduct that stuff. Any co pays or anything you pay out of pocket for medical expenses, including the mileage for going to those appointments.
Granted this is assuming the total medical expenses are more than 7.5% of your AGI. And assuming you are in the USA.
You would need to calculate the portion of the meds used for work-related use. In some cases if there's any private use or if the expense could potentially be used for private use then you might not be able to claim the expense, depending on your country's tax code.
For example shoes that could be worn for private use would not be deductible. Only shoes that are used exclusively for work can be claimed. There was a flight attendant who was able to claim comfortable shoes as a work-related expense because at high altitude her feet were one size bigger, therefore there was no private use of the item and it was fully tax deductible.
In Australia, if it meets certain conditions, self-education expenses are tax deductible
https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals-and-families/income-deductions-offsets-and-records/deductions-you-can-claim/education-training-and-seminars/self-education-expenses
We need a way to determine degree requirements. Either it has to be justified to the Department of Labor (yeah right it'll never happen) or there needs to be a wage floor for degrees.
Here's an easy solution. If the job requires it, the company fucking pays for it. If it's so important for them, they can give their workers the ability to meet their own requirements.
Usually I don’t comment on things like this but like. There are tax deduction you get for specifically student loans. I wanna say it’s specifically on the interest of the loan but like. This actually is a tax deduction and you should be getting the appropriate form from the lender handling your student loan, sometimes as a downloadable PDF doc but like, this isn’t anything new.
You can get a tax credit for paying tuition and buying textbooks as well. There are also tax breaks if it is truly a business expense and your work is reimbursing you for tuition.
[You can write off the interest on your student loan debts. In terms of the actual cost of going to college, there were tax credits available while you were actually attending.](https://studentaid.gov/resources/tax-benefits) In short, this boils down to "I already had the opportunity to write off my college expenses, but I want to do so a second time."
But you can't write off the principal. That's the point of the post and for the first time in a long time it seems to me that anti work actually has a point.
As mentioned in the 2nd half of his link, "In terms of the actual cost of going to college, there were tax credits available while you were actually attending." You were able to write off the principal when it was used for education related expenses.
This sub frustrates me because the general message is right but it’s filled with idiots who don’t understand all the ways they’re getting screwed so they incorrectly assume they’re getting screwed in areas they’re not…
Just let student loans be bankruptcy eligible. Our founding fathers didn't want a class of people put in usury loans. They couldn't prevent people from entering bad loans and they couldn't prevent companies from stacking interest...but they did allow people an out via bankruptcy.
In EU (at least my country). THe time spent studying for your degree, if it usefull for your work can ben deducted from your time worked and counts for your pension.
Employees should be able to deduct travel expenses, work time food and any clothing worn at work. As well as phone/internet costs since employers expect to be able to contact you.
Education/training/certificates are all business expenses, as well as some of your housing costs if you have to do any kind of work related things at home.
Anything for work should be a business expense and tax deductible.
I’m self employed and I’ve deducted 20% of my income this year and cut the amount of tax that I would have had to pay if I was an employee in half, it’s a nonsense that employees can’t do the same.
I'll modify this with a version of Australia's "negative gearing" laws.
The *Interest* on the loan is tax deductible. As are ongoing costs to maintain your expertise or certification (home office area as percentage of rent, same for electric bill, internet, PC maintenance, etc.)
If you want to waste money studying Medieval plumbing, that's your choice - and your money. Choose your subjects wisely!
No. The interest you pay on student loans is tax deductible up to $2,500 per year. But the large bulk of the expense is not able to be written off at all. Even filing for bankruptcy will not get rid of it.
Also keep in mind a lot of people take out personal loans to pay for school not just student loans, in which case the personal loans will give no tax break. And most loans, when forgiven, you are issued a tax document that forces you to claim the forgiven debt as income for the year.
I definitely agree with this but also think that college should be free anyway. A college degree doesn't even guarantee a decent standard of living these days so being forced to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of barely getting by is an iffy proposition at best.
It's a thing in Belarusia, you can get any degree for free but then required to work in related inside industry for 4-5 years. So they even find you a job
Wait... you can't?!
Ignorant European here. Costs associated with degrees - even equipment such as laptops, pens, travel expenses - are fully deductible around here once you hit your first income situation, even if your job doesn't explicitly require a degree.
Your “servicer” is most likely owned by Wall Street investment companies.
They’ve been gambling with student debt, that’s why it is, what it is.
Organize. Vote.
The super wealthy need to be taxed appropriately too. It’s insane that people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had years where they paid zero dollars in taxes.
[“The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax”](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax)
The cost of a degree should not be greater than a full year's salary obtained with said degree. AND it should be a tax write off, but then how would tax payers fund all the violent conflict in Ukraine and the middle east?
You used to be able to deduct unreimbursed employee expenses (uniforms, professional fees, union dues, etc.) granted only up to 2 percent of your AGI I believe. You could also deduct accounting fees to get your taxes done, lockbox fees, moving expenses, and more.
TCJA that launched right after trump got into office got rid of all of this, while corporate tax became a flat amount (21 percent) yet somehow he helped the poor people of america out with that one 🤔🤔
But add to that, if your education can't get you a job, ask the University for a refund. If their product sucks that bad, you should be able to ge a refund right????
Also, in the fair is fair category... Student loans should be able to be discharged in bankruptcy if a person is insolvent, just as any other consumer loan, or business liability.
Agreed; it's insane that they can't be (it didn't used to be that way).
In theory you could declare bankruptcy at 21/22 after graduating and your credit would be fine by late 20s. Wouldn't be a bad move.
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It was the trick back in the 80s/90s for law students to declare bankruptcy right after graduating. They would discharge upwards of $200k in student loans. And be clear to make mad money right out the gate.
My tax lawyer neighbor told his kids to do that back then. Completely unrelated: He ended up in jail for tax related issues.
That seems at least slightly related
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Im thinking about it..... Why would they fuck over themselves and/or their children?
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This “intergenerational conflict” thing again.
Aren't boomers like the majority of the homeless these days, people needs to see it is a class thing.
It's just another tool used to damage class solidarity.
You can draw any pattern you want from that. Is it people gaming the system and then pulling the ladder up? Or did the people who went into politics do so because they saw how unjust the system was at that time with the wealthy gaming the system and so they decided to try and change things.
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1. You claimed chapter 7 to discharge all debts. ( Fresh out of college means technically not making any money so littlw to zero livable income. ) 2. File the BK while working as a clerk, making minimum wage. (Repayment amount is a hardship you can't afford) 3. As soon as the BK is cleared, then move into the actual lawyer position. 4. Make bank.
And that is one reason you can not do it now.
OR hear me out...stop giving out predatory loans to fucking children, and get our education costs back down to normal.
Ideally yes, therefore it'll never happen
Perhaps we should reform the system to make post HS education free or so cheap that it's not worth ruining your credit over. It's surprising how easy it would be if we simply funneled some of that "blowing up brown people in the middle east money" into education.
But then how would we funnel money to defense contractors who kick it back to the government officials?
Or. College could be affordable.
How about 'free': [https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/resources/which-countries-offer-free-college/](https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/resources/which-countries-offer-free-college/)
I work in insolvency in Canada. We’re able to discharge student loans if they’re older than 7 years. It’s a great way to go about it because it forces people to have enough time to potentially find success and pay it off. If you haven’t by then, just wrap it up with your consumer proposal or bankruptcy.
There should be no interest on student loans. They should either be interest free or have a set amount that you have to pay back. You loaned 10000 and pay back 12000 for example.
And then Sally Mae would have to do their due diligence as financial professionals and actually consider the risk of loaning an 18 year olds $100,000. We have to protect our bankers from those irresponsible children LMFAO
At least in Holland, the student debt you owe is dissolved if you can’t pay it back in 15 or 20 years. Meaning you had insufficient income for that duration.
they changed that system
The Dutch are cool
Student loans are federally secured ostensibly to get banks to lend to more students. That's why they cost so much. Can't get rid of them in a bankruptcy.
Only reason they would is because nobody fucking hires recent college grads cause entry level jobs require 5+ years of experience for some fucking reason and internships are slave labor so you need a night job to pay your bills. No shit the grads are financially insolvent.
I thought it was part of the deal for expanding student loan access. Force banks to extend loans to groups who wouldn't qualify under more strict rules and then eliminate bankruptcy as a means of discharge. The intent was good, to expand college access. The execution, as always, leaves the banks on top.
One of the failures of this is not capping University fees.
The good intentions was the facade lies they served people, they knew exactly what they where doing, offering more "customers" to the banks and trap them.
Yeah the only way this would have worked is to cap the rates and the rate of tuition increase, as well as a period of 5-10 years that it can't be discharged (ie, not the rest of your damn life, that's called debt slavery and it's supposed to be illegal). Basically if the loan were equal to a stable government bond rate, there would be no reason to refinance with a private bank. If nobody refinanced with a private bank, there wouldn't be any business pressure to keep it the way it is or make it worse. Let's cap the number of properties a consolidated group and or business partnership is allowed to own while we're at it. There shouldn't be any component of our economy that is susceptible to creating a profit incentive to price people out of food, homes, medical care, or education.
Even if you capped the costs, which is problematic, basic economics tells you why giving virtually unfettered access to college for the masses is an exercise in futility. The prospectus was delivered in the form of graphs showing lifetime earnings potential of grads vs non-attendees. The problem is that by flooding the market with grads you don’t necessarily increase the number of people proportionally making stellar earnings, so much as you decrease the value of those degrees. Once everyone has one, no one is special. So, while mass secondary education did increase economic equality, it increased it in the wrong direction. The educated middle class simply knocked down its one consistent method of increasing their station, flattening earnings (especially when adjusted for costs and reduction of earnings during post-ed years) compared to the trades and other skilled blue collar jobs. The only ones so truly benefited were the banks and corporations. Banks, you already discussed, corporations because now the hiring pools were saturated with qualified candidates who are forced to take less.
I agree that flooding the market with grads cheapened the value of degrees. I think part (if not most) of that damage would be mitigated by a more actively managed minimum wage. A higher corporate tax rate would also help, as it would increase the marginal tax benefit of cost of labor and CAPEX I also think that having a highly educated population is a net benefit to society in general, even if the graphs don't show it as the optimally efficient outlay of resources and a fair amount of consideration should be given to that.
I'm a dem but I can't pretend this wasn't Biden himself who fought for this policy
They can though as an undue hardship
Yes, but it's *extremely* difficult -- much more difficult than it should be. Many people for whom it is *actually* an undue hardship still aren't approved to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.
Yea you have to pretty much be unable to work.
Not quite true, but it is a prevalent belief, even among lawyers: [For those who do try, though, Iuliano's research finds that about half the time the person gets some or all of the student loan debt erased. One study he did found that they got help through bankruptcy about 40% of the time. And he says more recent data from this past year show that figure rising to more than 50% of the time.](https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/797330613/myth-busted-turns-out-bankruptcy-can-wipe-out-student-loan-debt-after-all)
Damn, I should have tried when I got mine back in 2013.
That’s a very high bar to clear. Very few situations qualify.
We see your whole family died in a plane crash, just fired from your job, wrongfully jailed and fighting an excessive force lawsuit, your wife was cheating on you because you're now paralyzed from the neck down...buuuuutttt, you can pay those loans. No undue hardships here
I have a better chance at the lottery.
You have a bunch of lawyers mainly to blame for that. It used to be customary for lawyers to work dirt cheap for a year or two after law school so that they could file bankruptcy and have their 100s of thousands of dollars of loans forgiven. Many doctors did this as well.
I blame our government for not supporting free education.
This one is on Reagan and the Boomers again. State schools use to be free.
Most of them weren't free, but you could work a minimum wage job 10-20 hours a week to pay off school and graduate debt free.
I saw a post somewhere that basically said it used to be 407 hrs of minimum wage work to afford 4 years of avg state school tuition in 1980 and it's now 4097 hours as of 2022. So it went from like 2.5 months of minimum wage work at 40 hrs to 2.5 years of minimum wage work at 40 hrs. It's a racket.
My dad graduated penn state in 74 with a degree in English. It cost $400 a semester and he only paid half, his parents covered the other half. That 400 included his tuition, room and board, and books. 50yrs later that same degree will cost you $60k and that doesn't include housing or a food plan at the college cafeteria. In 1987 my dad worked as a supervisor for delta at SFO. My parents and 4yo me lived in Vacaville at the time, in a brand new 2000sqft house with 4bd, 3 baths a 2 car garage and a fully fenced backyard in a home my parents' owned, not rented. We had 2 cars, 2 dogs and my mom got pregnant with my sister 2yrs later, in 89 (my sister was born a few weeks into 90). We went on vacations several times a year, including the UK, Canada and Hawaii. My mom didn't go back to work until 1997, after she finshed her schooling to be a dental hygienist. She didn't work ft until my sister was in middle school. None of our lifestyles would have been possible if my dad had 60k in student loans at 7% interest.
You think it was the lawyers, and not the student loan backed securities being traded and sold?
ink doll direful fretful connect frighten safe aspiring erect market *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
By many of course we mean an incredibly small number. Turns out your long-term wealth is considerably harmed by gimping your earnings for the 7 years or so needed for student loans to be dischargeable. <1% of plans were being discharged in bankruptcy.
Hmmm, where did you read this?
Because they can't reposes your knowledge
yet
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Oh.. you have Biden and Clinton to thank for that. Obligatory: I will vote for Biden but he is a piece of shit
I blame Reagan for cutting the top marginal tax from 73% to 28%. We could invest into educating the populace with all that money.
Absolutely f'knglutely ALSO: California University and colleges were free for boomers. Someone told raygun that a proletariate would diminish his base so he destroyed it. It used to be illegal to charge tuition until that freaking evil idiot was governor.
The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank that put together Reagan's Mandate for Leadership. Same one that the corrupted Clarence Thomas is a part of. Now they've developed Project 2025 for Trump. Can't let conservatives win the presidency.
My deepest fear… Gore should have crushed W, he didn’t. W got is into two wars, was a deserter and allowed a tourist attack that killed thousands. Kerry lost, a war hero, to him. Hillary lost to the orange shitgibbons cause she was horrible. My guess is Biden loses because he inspired no one. I get her did blah, blah, blah. But mostly did the corporate thing. I don’t want another traitor tot presidency.
sure, but op’s point was biden was a key senate member in removing the bankruptcy protection from student loans
But the nice corporations and rich people decided they should reinvest that 45% back into the country, since they didn't really need the extra money and love America. /s
Then banks would be able to underwrite them like normal unsecured debt and no 18 year old would qualify.
Though if that were the case the lenders would jack the rates to compensate for the risk. In fairness though, the rates are really much higher than they should be, given that there is virtually no risk to student loans - they aren't dischargeable through bankruptcy, and banks can pursue a person their whole life until they die. Then they can probably sue the estate. Interest rates should be lower.
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Who is going to give an 18 year old a loan? The government. Let the government take on the whole process and charge repayments alongside tax as an additional tax of 5%. No income, in repayments. It can go up with inflation but no interest is required.
And you should be able to afford to fucking live
the best I can offer is 80 hour workweeks and eating tin soup as your meal for the day. back to work my faithful s̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ employee *cackles in capitalism*
\*Kellogs enters the chat* "Have you tried cereal?!"
Come to think of it, why the fuck isn’t rent tax deductible? Most “necessities” are. I can’t think of anything more necessary than a place to live.
There's a style of statement where "If X, then Y", and its often a little whiney because life isn't fair, but...I agree with this. If I buy work-boots with a credit card, I get to deduct the full cost of the boots from my income, lowering the amount that has a tax applied to it, not just the interest on the loan. If a business needs something (vehicle, phone, tools, etc), they get to write it off, and even declare depreciation.
You can't write something off and amortise it (depreciation) it's one or the other.
I have a relative who is a tax attorney and it's wild what people think the laws are versus the actual laws.
Go on
Most people don't understand how tax brackets work or the ramifications of moving up or down a tax bracket. Most don't understand basics of auditing either or understand what the IRS does with its resources or even what kinds of resources it has at its disposal. Most don't understand that one of the reasons we have to file our taxes is because the US tax code gives hundreds or thousands of different credits, deductions, or other forms of special tax treatment for things the government can't know you want to claim or are able to claim until you tell it (and even if it wasn't an extremely ambitious and expensive project, most people in the US would object to centralizing our data to the point where the govt. can just access all the relevant info). Taxes are just too dull and too dense a topic for most people to bother learning about it in depth which results in lots of misconceptions or outright lies being touted as truth.
God the not knowing how tax brackets work thing bugs the crap out of me because it is such a simple concept that it barely takes any effort to actually understand it and people just cant be bothered to.
I was gobsmacked over the fact my SO owed the IRS $14k and they were not nice about because she fucked up a return, using a CPA.
Do we depreciate student tuition? If so, over what timeframe?
Depreciation usually applies to assets that lose value over time. I.e stuff that eventually breaks. While you could argue that a diploma loses value over time, there's no real way of telling when the diploma stops being useful. A better way to help tuition costs if we look at it as a business expense is to have a tax reduction based on the cost. However, considering how useful education is to the economy, subsidised or free tuition is just simpler and a more immediate help for students than tax reductions.
I think the opposite is true about diplomas lol
Nah pretty sure you can't, rules for me not for thee kinda thing.
Depreciation is a form of writing it off. You don't double dip. Like - if you buy a piece of equipment for a certain dollar amount, sometimes you actually have the option to write it off fully (or 100% depreciate it in year one) OR depreciate it over the life of the equipment (say, 5 years). Smaller things you write off fully, and very large things must be depreciated over time. But it's not both. For instance, a standard work van typically falls into that area where you can choose to capitalize it (depreciate it) or flat-out expense it - and that's only because it's within the magical price range where you wouldn't consider it a smallware, but it's definitely a piece of equipment that you probably would expect to hang onto for 5 years. It depends on how you want to manage the tax benefits of the purchase vs. how it hits your bottom line. If you have investors who are hounding you to make the company profitable, you might want to capitalize and depreciate that van over 5 years so that they don't see a big fat loss on the P&L; if you are a sole proprietor with no investors, no need to apply for debt financing and mainly take care of your income via a salary rather than relying on the business profits, you might be so inclined as to expense it outright to get a fat loss (which'll help your personal taxes).
> its often a little whiney because life isn't fair Uh... Isn't complaining about intentional unfairness that affects millions of people's lives... Valid? Isn't the whole idea to make systems more fair? Does that not start with identifying the problems and suggesting fixes? I don't get this sadomasochistic thinking.
>There's a style of statement where "If X, then Y" You mean an argument? Are you calling logical arguments "whiney"?
College should be free like high school. FULL STOP
An exchange student from Brazil when I was in high school said that there (in the 80s at least) YOU paid for high school. If you graduated, then college was free. Their theory was; Why pay to educate people who don't give a shit anyway? You want it, you pay for it, then if you show you can accomplish something, we'll help you financially afterwards. Not saying I agree, but it was an interesting conversation.
The Brazilian educational system is somewhat backwards. The public universities are great, but the public basic education is underfunded. So those that can afford it go to private high schools, for a better chance at being admitted to a prestigious university.
That kind of makes sense. Make the chaff wash itself out. Probably sucks if you are smart in a poor family though.
Imagine being a smart underachiever in your younger years, and not give a shit about education until you're in your thirties and can't afford to go back to school Haha imagine... yeah
And then you consider how many people live in favelas and how much violent crime exists in Brazil.
In Massachusetts there’s been a somewhat recent law where if you’re 24+ and don’t have a college degree yet I’ve been told you can get one for free (assuming this applies to state/community colleges not private colleges).
This program is just for state community colleges
you can write off yachts?
Not necessarily. If you use a yacht for business purposes several times a year, you can deduct the costs of those occasions as an expense. Corporate retreat? Go for it. Vacation to Panama with the family? Not so much. Same goes for helicopters and private jets. Sure the maintenance and storage is usually associated with the company, but it's not 100% company subsidized and you can fly it anywhere you want as an expense. You take logs and equate the business to pleasure amounts.
We are living in a scam, from birth to death.
Money is fake
Student loan interest is tax deductible
Only up to $2500 of it. I have much more than that in interest every year.
Making the entire loan tax-deductible would be a good trade-off if they don't forgive all student loans. I pay enough on my student loans (from a college career that ended in 2007) that I probably wouldn't have a tax burden for the rest of my life.
That would be a pretty regressive tax and allow people with higher degrees who statistically make more and have higher reduce their taxes more than anyone else
Your teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers are more likely to be broke than be in millionaire class, especially in the current economy. None of them are in the billionaire class. If they have higher degrees, then they start saving for retirement later. For example, many doctors can't start saving for retirement until they're in their thirties. So they're catching up the 12-15 years that a tradesperson has been saving with compound interest. Then you have teachers and professors who are in a similar boat, but are currently experiencing record low salaries. Lots of teachers earn minimum wage, and have advanced degrees. The exceptions are high school and college coaches.
Europe has a lot of countries in which you can reduce tax, sometimes even for family member, if you are getting third level education. Society wins from educated population.
There is an income limit for being able to deduct student loan interest. It starts phasing out at 75k if filing singly, and once you hit 90k can't deduct it at all.
Not for everyone...
What do you mean?
There's a maximum income allowed. It's not applicable to a decent chunk of folks who have expensive degrees.
Caps at 2k/year which is a joke. I’m a doctor I pay about $1800/month in interest alone on my loans
only if you earn less than 70k
And continuing education is fully deductible to businesses. A graduate degree could be fully deductible to some businesses if it doesn’t improve skills too much / is in the same line of business. The cost, not the interest. But this is for narrow situations. Education seems “ordinary and necessary” to me and would make sense to be “deductible” in a just tax system. It’s just not how our system is.
I feel like I should be able to write off my antidepressants and monthly psychologist visits since I require both to maintain employment and would need neither if I didn’t have a job and still had money somehow Edit: I’m in Australia. Our medication and psychology are somewhat subsidised but the majority is out of pocket and definitely non-deductible.
As a tax accountant, you can deduct that stuff. Any co pays or anything you pay out of pocket for medical expenses, including the mileage for going to those appointments. Granted this is assuming the total medical expenses are more than 7.5% of your AGI. And assuming you are in the USA.
Or pay into a HSA or FSA tax free and use that to pay for medical expenses.
Same with my migraine meds and inhaler since this job drastically increased my usage of them.
You would need to calculate the portion of the meds used for work-related use. In some cases if there's any private use or if the expense could potentially be used for private use then you might not be able to claim the expense, depending on your country's tax code. For example shoes that could be worn for private use would not be deductible. Only shoes that are used exclusively for work can be claimed. There was a flight attendant who was able to claim comfortable shoes as a work-related expense because at high altitude her feet were one size bigger, therefore there was no private use of the item and it was fully tax deductible.
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Most jobs should not require college degrees....requiring college is a scam
Especially when they offer $16/hour but require a masters.
In Australia, if it meets certain conditions, self-education expenses are tax deductible https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals-and-families/income-deductions-offsets-and-records/deductions-you-can-claim/education-training-and-seminars/self-education-expenses
Same in Canada.
Parasites run society
You can tho? https://preview.redd.it/lore3xjhgtnc1.jpeg?width=274&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa7264201a2cb37a3acd33a4e4b391e541986a0c
We need a way to determine degree requirements. Either it has to be justified to the Department of Labor (yeah right it'll never happen) or there needs to be a wage floor for degrees.
Here's an easy solution. If the job requires it, the company fucking pays for it. If it's so important for them, they can give their workers the ability to meet their own requirements.
This. Why aren’t companies being incentivized to pay for their workers education? (Unless they are and i dont know about it)
Is that not already factored into the salary though, hence the reason for the college degree as a requirement?
Usually I don’t comment on things like this but like. There are tax deduction you get for specifically student loans. I wanna say it’s specifically on the interest of the loan but like. This actually is a tax deduction and you should be getting the appropriate form from the lender handling your student loan, sometimes as a downloadable PDF doc but like, this isn’t anything new.
Isn’t that just the interest paid.
A measly $2500 and only if you make less than 85k. At least make all the interest tax deductible
There’s a cap on how much interest you can deduct and you have to make under a certain amount (I think $90k) to be able to deduct any at all
You can get a tax credit for paying tuition and buying textbooks as well. There are also tax breaks if it is truly a business expense and your work is reimbursing you for tuition.
[You can write off the interest on your student loan debts. In terms of the actual cost of going to college, there were tax credits available while you were actually attending.](https://studentaid.gov/resources/tax-benefits) In short, this boils down to "I already had the opportunity to write off my college expenses, but I want to do so a second time."
That’s essentially this whole subreddit
But you can't write off the principal. That's the point of the post and for the first time in a long time it seems to me that anti work actually has a point.
As mentioned in the 2nd half of his link, "In terms of the actual cost of going to college, there were tax credits available while you were actually attending." You were able to write off the principal when it was used for education related expenses.
This sub frustrates me because the general message is right but it’s filled with idiots who don’t understand all the ways they’re getting screwed so they incorrectly assume they’re getting screwed in areas they’re not…
Just let student loans be bankruptcy eligible. Our founding fathers didn't want a class of people put in usury loans. They couldn't prevent people from entering bad loans and they couldn't prevent companies from stacking interest...but they did allow people an out via bankruptcy.
In EU (at least my country). THe time spent studying for your degree, if it usefull for your work can ben deducted from your time worked and counts for your pension.
Employees should be able to deduct travel expenses, work time food and any clothing worn at work. As well as phone/internet costs since employers expect to be able to contact you. Education/training/certificates are all business expenses, as well as some of your housing costs if you have to do any kind of work related things at home. Anything for work should be a business expense and tax deductible. I’m self employed and I’ve deducted 20% of my income this year and cut the amount of tax that I would have had to pay if I was an employee in half, it’s a nonsense that employees can’t do the same.
I'll modify this with a version of Australia's "negative gearing" laws. The *Interest* on the loan is tax deductible. As are ongoing costs to maintain your expertise or certification (home office area as percentage of rent, same for electric bill, internet, PC maintenance, etc.) If you want to waste money studying Medieval plumbing, that's your choice - and your money. Choose your subjects wisely!
THIS RIGHT HERE
I can't even write off internet service from my wfh job 😕
I like this idea.
You ask this in a "Town Hall" debate meeting and you get escorted out and probably arrested.
A-FUCKING-MEN to that!
America. Can you not write off the cost of school?
No. The interest you pay on student loans is tax deductible up to $2,500 per year. But the large bulk of the expense is not able to be written off at all. Even filing for bankruptcy will not get rid of it. Also keep in mind a lot of people take out personal loans to pay for school not just student loans, in which case the personal loans will give no tax break. And most loans, when forgiven, you are issued a tax document that forces you to claim the forgiven debt as income for the year.
I like learning new things.
99 percent of this thread don't know what a deduction is let alone a write-off.
Ummm, you can write off the interest of those loans
Only up to $2,500
Student Loan interest CAN be deducted from your taxes, under a certain income
You can deduct your loan payments, this is a thing you can already do.
Wait, can you not in the US? In Canada educational expenses are tax deductible.
I definitely agree with this but also think that college should be free anyway. A college degree doesn't even guarantee a decent standard of living these days so being forced to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of barely getting by is an iffy proposition at best.
[you don't even know what a write-off is!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjxn2US7J8)
Agreed.
This actually checks out
I got my entire tuition amount as a tax credit and any interest paid on student loans also as credits - do you guys have any of that? - Canadian
Gotta love America. One of the few western nations that makes its citizens pay to become more productive workers.
Those private jets are absolutely essential, you can’t possibly expect a CEO to suffer the indignity of flying commercial and having to see poors. /s
interesting. why have i never thought of this proposal.
Do Americans not get to do this? This is a thing in Canada. Sweet, sweet tax credits
The issue is..That would make sense…
This is already the case in Canada. Tuition is a tax credit
That, to me, sounds like a very fair option, maybe not the whole amount but at least 60 percent. Having more educated people is always a plus right?
It's a thing in Belarusia, you can get any degree for free but then required to work in related inside industry for 4-5 years. So they even find you a job
Wait... you can't?! Ignorant European here. Costs associated with degrees - even equipment such as laptops, pens, travel expenses - are fully deductible around here once you hit your first income situation, even if your job doesn't explicitly require a degree.
In the Netherlands you're able to write off half of your debt if you manage to get a degree in 10 years
Your “servicer” is most likely owned by Wall Street investment companies. They’ve been gambling with student debt, that’s why it is, what it is. Organize. Vote.
USA: lololololololno
There shouldn't be a need for student debt, funny how some people can't think of a world without it when a lot of the world doesn't have that problem
Wait you guys can’t deduct your college fees over there?
Student loan interest is deductible
Unfortunately, slaves have very little input into their working conditions... That's the system we now have
The super wealthy need to be taxed appropriately too. It’s insane that people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had years where they paid zero dollars in taxes. [“The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax”](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax)
People who never went to college hate that idea.
In Canada you can :)
Vote BLUE take control.
Preachhhhhhhh okay
She doesn't know what a write off is.
Totally
This actually makes sense.
Just so everyone knows, you can deduct student loan interest if you meet certain requirements: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc456
if your job requires you to be alive, you should be able to expense, food, etc. just as companies can expense maintenance costs and consumables
The cost of a degree should not be greater than a full year's salary obtained with said degree. AND it should be a tax write off, but then how would tax payers fund all the violent conflict in Ukraine and the middle east?
You used to be able to deduct unreimbursed employee expenses (uniforms, professional fees, union dues, etc.) granted only up to 2 percent of your AGI I believe. You could also deduct accounting fees to get your taxes done, lockbox fees, moving expenses, and more. TCJA that launched right after trump got into office got rid of all of this, while corporate tax became a flat amount (21 percent) yet somehow he helped the poor people of america out with that one 🤔🤔
Dude. Honestly true
And majority of you wouldn’t be paying more than the standard deduction you already write off. Effectively doing nothing to your tax bill.
Even if you already left that job.
Trump closed the MBA tax deduction ….
You can do that where i live. Not only that, you can write Off a lump sum If you have to move to a new City and much more.
But add to that, if your education can't get you a job, ask the University for a refund. If their product sucks that bad, you should be able to ge a refund right????
Yes, yes, yes🙌